Read Online Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert - Free Book Online Page B

fullest disclosure of a relevant circumstance.
    â€œBlast!” said the Assistant Commissioner.
    â€œYes, sir,” said Chief Inspector Hazlerigg.
    â€œIt’s damned inconvenient.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œI particularly don’t want to take you off your regular work” – he meant Inspector Hazlerigg’s permanent Black Market assignment – “but I don’t see what I can do. With Aspinall and Hervey in Lancashire looking for that damned maniac and Cass in Paris; and now Pannel has to go and crock himself.”
    â€œI expect I can manage it, sir. Pickup can do my job here—” But there was more to be said, and both men knew it.
    â€œLook here,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “I think I’d better give you a quick outline, and then you’ll see how-well, never mind that. I won’t start by prejudicing you. Now. At eleven o’clock this morning a partner in this firm of solicitors—what’s their name?—Horniman, Birley and Craine, opened one of their deed boxes. The box was supposed to contain papers relating to a trust. What they found in it was one of the trustees. Name of Smallbone—Marcus Smallbone—very dead.”
    He paused: then added inconsequentially: “The late senior partner in that firm was Abel Horniman. Friend of the Commissioner.”
    â€œWasn’t he the chairman of a committee on Criminal Law Revision?”
    â€œThat’s the man. Quite a leading light in the Law Society, and between you and me pretty widely tipped for the next Honours List. His name was a big one in legal circles and he was beginning” – the Assistant Commissioner, though he didn’t know it, was here paraphrasing Mr. Birley – “he was beginning to be a bit of a public figure, too.”
    â€œBut if he’s dead, sir,” said Hazlerigg cautiously, “I can’t quite see how—”
    â€œHe died about four weeks ago,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “of angina. He’d been ill for some time. I think it would be fair to say that he knew he was booked. His doctor had told him as much.”
    â€œI see, sir.”
    â€œOur pathologist’s first opinion,” went on the Assistant Commissioner, with elaborate casualness, “is that Smallbone had been dead for at least six weeks-possibly eight-maybe ten.”
    â€œYes,” said Hazlerigg. “Yes, I see.”
    â€œAbel Horniman and Marcus Smallbone were fellow trustees—the only trustees—of a very big affair—the Ichabod Stokes Trust. That’s an obvious line on the thing, of course. It’s almost the only direct connection between the two men.”
    â€œAnd is this trust—I don’t know the proper legal word—is it in order?”
    â€œThat’s one of the things you’ll have to find out. Colley—he’s the D.D.I—I’ll give you his full report in a minute—asked them about it. Apparently it isn’t just as easy as all that. One of the difficulties is that all the papers which might have helped should have been in that deed box—”
    â€œAnd they were all gone?”
    â€œEvery one of them. Good Lord, as it was, there was hardly an inch of room to spare. If Smallbone hadn’t have been quite unusually small and slight his body would never have gone in at all.”
    â€œTen weeks,” said Hazlerigg. “I should have thought they’d have begun to notice him by that time.”
    â€œIn the ordinary way, yes,” agreed the Assistant Commissioner. “But these were special boxes, as you’ll see. A rubber sealing band round the edge and a compressor lid.”
    â€œRather unusual, sir,” said Hazlerigg. “Whose idea were they?”
    â€œAbel Horniman’s.”
    â€œYes,” said Hazlerigg again. He was already beginning to see the outlines of a simple but unsatisfactory affair with a lot of